More and More: a novel

By Christoffer Krug

A hot summer in India. Nora, Moritz and Alex meet by chance. Everybody is looking for something.

After a more than turbulent trip to India, Moritz is standing at Frankfurt Airport and has to realize: "It smells different. Sterile. Not of laughter, not of life, not of suffering and not of love. The old, fat Germany simply smells of nothing."
Culture shock backwards. Moritz takes the train home and tells his story of wanderlust, the search for meaning, real friendship, love and loss.

"Sex, drugs and rock n' roll. An Indian roadmovie in a book."

• Language: English
• Publisher: tredition
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9783347065239

Book preview

Frankfurt am Main, Airport 07: 06 pm

It smells rancid. I'm on a plane. A puddle of saliva is on my headrest. I must have fallen asleep. Dinner is served. The flight attendants drive the catering trolley through the far too narrow aisles. The trolleys are made of baked dough, they bump against the edges and crumble a little further apart at every narrow spot in the aisle. The flight attendants communicate with each other with duck looseners, but the chief steward answers with a kazoo. What’s going on here?

We're flying through turbulence. When I go to the bathroom, I see a member of the flight crew tied up in the rear of the plane. She was tied to the toilet door with strawberry strings and unrolled liquorice snails, so that I find it difficult to open the door. The toilet is surprisingly spacious. I wash my hands and sit down in a basket chair hanging from the ceiling. Single drops of water run down the sink and fall to the floor. The ground slowly dissolves.

Now I see through everything. First of all, the plane is made of sugar icing. Secondly: there's a terrorist on board. I'm going to crash into first class and try to expose him. I succeed immediately. It's the SENATOR.

He has already stood in a corner, opened his pants and wants to start peeing. I jump up behind him, prick my outstretched index finger in his side and call out: "I've got you figured out SENATOR: You want to pee a huge hole in the sugar plane wall and make us all crash!

The other passengers stare at me and nod thoughtfully. The SENATOR closes his pants and sits down again. I have prevented the accident.

Return

A person can recognize hundreds of smells during a lifetime and store many individual scents in his memory for the rest of his life. In my head, the number of smells that have been smelled and accumulated in my life so far has at least doubled in the recent months.

Shit, sweat, dust, spices, disease, poverty, garbage, cows, tea, monkeys, cigarettes, the back of an elephant.

The smells are all on me and they are also in me. Under my arms it smells like cardamom and curry, my clothes smell like the street dust of a city of millions. And the moment the airplane door opens and the dry, cold wind blows the autumn air into my face, I know that I have come back. It smells different, somehow stale, the air here has no smell of its own. It smells sterile, not of laughter, not of life, not of suffering and not of love. The old, fat Germany simply smells of nothing.

I collect my things, stuff my MP3 player into my backpack, put on my worn-out sneakers and search the floor under the seat to make sure I don't leave anything lying around. The last 45 minutes on this plane were like a time travel back to the 1970s. The replacement plane from London to Frankfurt is an older model. Outside probably well maintained, but inside it is completely in orange and brown. The carpet has orange circles with black dots and looks like it has 100 eyes. In this way the plane is the perfect backdrop for the scraps of thoughts that have been circling around in my head for hours. I am back in Germany. Actualy I should be happy or relieved. I am not. No one is expecting me here, and therefore I don't have high expectations of my own return.

My left arm is not usable and hangs in a small noose. If I move it too often, it immediately starts throbbing again. The fingers that stick out at the front of the bandage are red, warm and slightly swollen. In Delhi the bandage had been white for a few minutes, now it is ash grey.

I've been up for hours. In Delhi I almost had to fight for my boarding pass in a small turmoil at the counter to even get a return flight. Now I am infinitely tired.

I did not really miss Germany and my hometown Hamburg. It is said that the hungry always have food pleasantly in their nostrils, while the satiated feel aversion. When I breathe in the humid and cold autumn air, I almost feel sick.

Slowly the plane empties, I stop in an alcove and wait so that I don't have to be bumped into by anybody in the corridor. The painkillers are used up, and every active or passive movement of my arm immediately sends pain impulses to my brain to remind me of all my mistakes and clumsiness. I have to find a pharmacy quickly and get the strongest possible remedy.

My crumpled passport lies lost in the big hands of the Immigration official, who leafs through it indifferently back and forth. He holds the passport up and his gaze oscillates between my photo on the first page and my face. He sighs audibly, closes the passport and pushes it over the counter. As I leave, I watch from the corner of my eye as he wonders about the red colour on his fingers and rubs them suspiciously. I have almost passed the passport control box when the side door opens again and an official tells me to turn around. In his gaze I read:

You know exactly why!

A couple behind me starts whispering.

They want me to show my passport again.

Surely you realize that your I.D. is a federal document! How's the paint getting in here?

I shrug my shoulders. I don't feel like explaining something I know they wouldn't understand anyway. I can hear the man behind me explaining in a teacherlike voice to his companion that in some countries it is even forbidden to stain banknotes and that you can be arrested if you do not treat your passport well.

My passport's almost falling apart.

His companion giggles excitedly, and when I turn to her, she gives me a pitiful but stern look with her arrogant eyes. Let them arrest me. I don't care if they arrest me.

Of course they'll let me go after the lecture. The baggage carousel is already making its rounds when I arrive. My luggage is shrunk down to a little grey duffel bag. Most of what I thought was so important was lost in India. It feels so good to travel with light luggage.

In the arrival terminal I find a pharmacy and buy a box of tablets. I take two of them still in the shop and swallow them laboriously without water. The pharmacist stares at me as if I were a junkie pushing heroin in her shop.

I hardly know my way around the station at Frankfurt Airport, but the infallible German signs with their beautiful, clear and factual inscriptions show me the way to the long-distance train station a few floors down. Everything is modern, everything is clean, many things shine. I walk through the tubular halls straight on and on, like a hamster lost in a gigantic pneumatic tube system. How does someone feel who has never seen all this in its glittering splendour and sober functionality before?

I just want to sleep. Standard question for testing depressive tendencies: Do you sometimes have the desire to fall asleep and not wake up again? Answer: I wouldn't care if I could just sleep.

The queue at the ticket counter consists of three people. A businessman with a grey coat over his suit and briefcase looks at his lush Omega Seamaster and blows the air between his teeth in a stressed way. I have to grin inside. I got used to much longer human snakes. They are in themselves an immeasurable luxury. A sign of discipline and order in chaos. From the type of queues you can tell the nationality of the people. I have to grin again when I think of how the lady at the ticket counter would react to a siege of 100 menfrom India with similar moustaches.

My scratched Visa card pays for the ticket to Hamburg. 106 Euros for the luxury of a four-hour and five-minute trip. It doesn't get any faster.

I am cold. The skin on my hands is flaking, and for the first time I start to feel dirty in this environment. When I go to the toilet, I look in the mirror again after a long time. I might as well hold the cover of some magazine in front of my face. Never did I expect to become such a stranger to myself. Only now do I understand the looks of people on the plane, at the counters, in the pharmacy. I look strange. My face is brown. But it does not have the average tan of a nice holiday, it looks leathery, shiny and tanned. Skin areas with old mosquito bites on my neck have been left lighter. My eyes look like they were made up with an eyeliner and the cheekbones have become more prominent. But the most impressive thing for me is that the man in the mirror has a beard. When I used to stroke my face, I always felt a thin layer of fluff covering my chin and upper lip. But now everything is overgrown, I can no longer see any free skin between my upper lip and neck. With both hands I scoop water into my face. I don't dry myself off, but go straight out into the cold, draughty platform tunnel. The piercing cold in my face revives me briefly.

My mind is racing, the painkillers are starting to work. The gradual fading out of the throbbing pain has almost a euphoric effect on me. The ICE Stuttgart enters quickly and stops almost silently, without making squeaking noises when braking. I involuntarily have to think of something gentle. The gentlest thing I can imagine at the moment is Alex and Nora. Alex and Nora are my friends. I helped them, and they were there for me. That's what friends do for each other. Positive energy doesn't get lost. I hope they're okay now. They really deserve it.

I choose a nice compartment and hope that I will stay there alone. The linen bag is standing on the place next to me, heaving it up on the luggage rack, I don't see myself in a position to do so. So I can lean sideways against it. With the correspondingly tightly stuffed contents, it conveys the feeling of a big, strong friend to whom one can lean calmly.

The train starts slowly, hardly noticeable.

Never before have I felt that my thoughts could no longer obey me. My brain and all my memories are like a film reel that got tangled up when I played it. Individual, faltering images appear on the screen, but everything is completely blurred by the careless efforts of the projectionist to thread the film roll back in correctly as quickly as possible before the cinema audience goes on a rampage and demands its money back. The film has three main actors. Two of them are really important. The third one not so much.

I'm the third.

I feel in the pocket of my dirty fleece jacket and find the iPod. The screen doesn't work anymore, but if I try around long enough I can still activate the random function. I